Archive for February, 2012

Crime writer Roger Smith, author of Dust Devils, revealed on Twitter today that his just-released novella, titled Ishmael Toffee, is now available worldwide as a free Kindle download.

Like other local crime writers such as Deon Meyer and Margie Orford, Smith has proved to be an international success – his books are published in six countries, he’s won the Deutscher Krimi Preis (German Crime Fiction Award), and his books Mixed Blood and Wake Up Dead are currently in development as feature films in the US.

Smith has been described by Cary Darling in the Washington Post as someone who “writes with the brutal beauty of an Elmore Leonard in a very bad mood”. And, if that’s not sufficiently incentivising, the free kindle edition of Ishmael Toffee is a good enough reason to get reading.

Ishmael Toffee has killed more men than he can remember. His knife put him behind bars and kept him there for twenty years as a prison gang assassin until he lost his taste for blood. Paroled, he finds himself with no money and no family. And no knife in his hand.

He gets a job as a gardener at the luxurious home of a prominent lawyer and makes an unexpected friend–Cindy, the lawyer’s six-year-old daughter. When Ishmael discovers that Cindy is being raped by her father he must choose: abandon the girl and walk away, or do what he does best…

Little Liberia, as the title suggests, is about the Liberian community in a big Western metropolis: Staten Island, New York City. South African writer, Jonny Steinberg, follows the life journeys of two Liberians, Jacob and Rufus, whose paths cross. The book is, in its way, a critique of post-colonial Africa. Standing out from the crowd from early on, Rufus became a successful tailor in Liberia while the rest of his age-mates in Twelfth Street, Monrovia, were unemployed or casual workers.

This book is about smut. Extraordinary characters thrive in the dark world of drugs, blackmail, violence and sex – playful innocence destroyed in the gutter world of noisy bars, shooters and spiked drinks.

Broadly speaking, there is something curiously humourless, even dour, about South African literature. For a society to take stock (and celebrate) its multiculturalism, diversity and miscellany of voices, its banalities as well as its triumphs, writers must surely embrace the comical and light-hearted side of things to balance out a focus on the tragic and interminable. Yet the average reader (and by “average” I truly mean the man in the street) would be hard pressed to wax lyrical about local authors that successfully and consistently wring belly laughs from their audiences.

Africa is a Country has initiated a poll asking members of the public to vote for the most influential African thinker alive. While they acknowledge that not everyone will be happy with the list of “thinkers” they have generated, they have tried to include a range of intellectuals from different parts of the continent – or, indeed, outside the continent.

In an attempt to counteract the limited nature of such lists, Africa is a Country will host a second round where readers’ suggestions will determine the choices. You can offer your suggestions for the second round of voting in the comments section below the poll, on Africa is a Country’s Facebook page or via Twitter.

At the end of 2011 we contemplated asking you, dear reader, who you think was the most influential African thinker alive. We abandoned the idea for a while because of our thing against lists (except our end of year lists, of course). I got the initial idea from the British blog, Left Foot Forward, which had run a contest to determine “the most influential leftwing thinker of the year 2010/11.” The result of the Left Foot Forward contest is here. Based on reader choices, Left Foot Forward came up with the usual suspects (among others, economist and columnist Paul Krugman, columnist Polly Toynbee, journalist Will Hutton, author and academic Owen Jones, and Caroline Lucas, the leader of Britain’s Green Party) but also with some strange ones (Tony Blair? Barack Obama? Bernard Henri-Lévy?). On that latter group: it is true that one man’s leftwing is another’s rightwing. That said, an inevitable blind spot of Left Foot Forward’s list was that “left-wing thinker” is synonymous with “Anglo American,” and of course heavily British. So, it got me thinking: If we could ask our readers (and critics, and everyone else) to do the same thing, who would you pick?

Published by Jacana Media in 2007, this is a wonderful collection of opinions gathered over a three year period on a website known to many. The term “O’Mandingo” means the ones that are called Mandingos. As one may already guess, this book is about black pride. Miyeni analyses racial relations in South Africa after apartheid and all over the world. The topics covered here encompass all the ones we encounter in our daily lives. Movies, work, and service at a restaurant…It is all very relatable and exhaustive.

This is a simple story of two worlds; one, the underbelly of urban Dar-es-Salaam where Moses the child vagrant stakes his claim to eke out a living and the other, the wilderness of Tanzania where man remains an unwelcome intruder.

See Moses through the eyes of this one old man who contemplates him at the local market in Dar as the boy wolves down the food offered by the older man:

What does one do with such a child? A child soon to become a man with nothing but his shirt? And what a shirt it is, held together by strings.